A months-long fight between a few parents and Jefferson Parish School Board President Michael Delesdernier over the system's policy on siblings transferring to the same accelerated academies has nearly become its own reality show as the dispute spilled onto television this week.

Michael Delesdernier

WVUE-TV aired snippets of Delesdenier's email sniping over the issue. In a July email to Acting Superintendent James Meza, Delesdernier referred to one protesting parent as "an arrogant pos" needing "a class in manners." In a June email, he told a parent he was "self-centered" and demanding responses to "rants." In an August email he told a parent, "You are rude, demanding and unreasonable. By giving you an audience it only encourages more bad behavior."

School system records also show that parents peppered school officials with meeting requests, records requests, complaints about a lack of responsiveness and criticism.

"I hope this is not how you run your business," a parent wrote to Delesdernier. Another parent complained to school officials that her family had been "put through a ridiculous ordeal due to misinformation, lack of information and a lack of transparency." Another email reads, "It's pathetic that nobody from the Jefferson Parish school system will respond to an email from a parent."

The bickering stems from a policy adopted in February that maintained the separation of siblings enrolled in different advanced academies. In some families, older children enrolled in the first academies the system opened, but their younger brothers and sisters began their schooling after additional advanced campuses opened, putting them in newly created attendance zones for different schools.

Parents pleaded that siblings should be able to attend the same schools, and the School Board approved a policy that would accommodate the younger siblings contingent on approval from the federal judge who presided over Jefferson's school desegregation case.

Delesdernier said on Friday that he is frustrated with what he sees as some parents burdening the schools with demands on issues that are relevant to a small segment of the system's students. He called parents "anarchists" he said, because he believed they were trying to create chaos.

But he said the episode has shown him he should moderate his language to avoid fueling the kinds of discord that distract from more important work in the schools.

"I've been admonished by Mark Jacobs," Delesdernier said about a fellow board member.

Delesdernier's emails continue a pattern of sometimes gruff rhetoric that emerges occasionally at board meetings. Presiding over last week's meeting, he threatened to excuse another member from the meeting for speaking out of turn and said he might never again allow members to speak under "personal privilege" after he became unhappy with the tone of the proceedings.

Meza at one point fiddled with his microphone trying to get it to work and said, "I have mic problems tonight."

"A lot of people have Mike problems tonight," Delesdernier quipped.

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